Custom Combination Discipline / Technique

Heart of the Green I

Auspex 1, Celerity 1

Exp: 3

Retests with, science: botany, agricultural, or, crafts: gardening

A kindred is granted a limited ability to communicate with plants with this gift.

MET: A kindred places a single trait of their vitae into the soil around a plant, actives the discipline and waits 24 hours. The vitae in combination Auspex and Presence interacts with the already present elements through the soil, that secrete soluble chemicals into the soil and transporting them along thread-like networks formed by soil fungi.

Via that soil fungi, a kindred may now communicate directly with that plant, limited to the scope, type and manor in which plants normally communicate with each other. The kindred enacts usage of the discipline by touching the affected soil. Effects last for 30 days on the first application, 30 additional days for each application. After 12 applications, the effect is permanent between that one kindred, and that one plant.

Sample plant communication:

Trees warn each other about insect attacks, and begin pumping out bug-repelling chemicals to ward off attack. They manufacture and deploy chemical and other weapons that make their foliage less palatable or nutritious, so that hungry bugs attack. Plants can communicate with insects as well, sending airborne messages that act as distress signals to predatory insects that kill herbivores. Maize attacked by beet armyworms could releases a cloud of volatile chemicals that attracts wasps to lay eggs in the caterpillars’ bodies. Ants, microbes, moths, even hummingbirds and tortoises all detect and react to these blasts.

Note: The plant is not inherently a ghoul, nor does it require vitae past the initial usage. Subsequent generations of plants are increasingly susceptible to this discipline. The resulting plant grows at a normal rate. The vitae is destroyed in this process, no bonds are created.